Lileks on the Times

It seems like the New York Times is revealing all our national security secrets, but relax: they have their limits. If the Times learned that US troops were force-feeding Gitmo detainees with Coca-cola, they wouldn’t publish Coke’s secret formula. They might get sued. If there’s a CIA program that uses offensive cartoons of Mohammed to communicate with agents, they’ll keep mum, lest they have to publish the images. They might get stabbed. But secret law-enforcement-type programs as classified as the access code to the Times top-floor elevator? Fair game. You’ve the right to know.

Read it all.

And check back later at Radioblogger.com for transcripts of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens all commenting on the Times Two controversy.

UPDATE:

From a very smart correspondent:

To: Hugh HewittSubject: EXACTLY RIGHT — REVERSE ENGINEERING

greetings,

i know that you know this, but Hitch should also be smart enough to figure this out…

Just as our own military does a formal, requisite, post-mortem operational analysis, at virtually every level of command, now more politically correctly known as “Lessons Learned” or perhaps more humoursly (?) “Morning After” analysis,

the PUBLIC portions of; The 9/11 Commission Report, The Butler Report AND the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee all make it very clear that our foes COMMUNINCATE relentlessly over EVERY significant operation win and LOSS they have, and they expend considerable effort to learn from all their operational discontinuities….

for just one clear simple example; NOW for all the early phase operations on the AQ side that have been “off net” for a while, they will go down operational checklists to see what operational phase that their individual ops were at, and for all of those that were in a “funding” operational phase, they will explore through their Saudi/Yemeni/Sudanese/Afghani/Pakistani bankers the Who/What/When/Where/Why and How of their funding movements and NEVER use them (or anything like them) EVER AGAIN,,,

BTW, it is a trivial thing to run a pattern analysis on the internet web traffic that is currently crawling the SWIFT website and all related online SWIFT resources, and you can bet that there will soon be a “book’ of what funding sources to NEVER USE….